A number of factors are driving the health care and wellness industries to move towards comprehensive support of dynamic monitoring of patients and updating their personal records. This new approach to health care, sometimes coined e-health is driven by the need to reduce the cost of patient treatment and the inefficiencies associated with non-critical patients occupying scarce health care resources like hospital beds and nursing among others. The need for e-health is made more urgent by the ageing population in most industrialized countries.
Electronic transfer of medical records is currently used in hospitals around the world. The Digital Image and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) standard was developed to transfer images and associated patient details between an imaging device (e.g. Ultrasound imaging) and a database. The Health Level 7 standard was developed to track the accounting and visitation records for patients. Other software products are currently used by family doctors to store patient records on their computers. However, with the exception of imaging data, the vast majority of information included in patient records is entered manually. Doctors' and nurses' handwritten notes are often scanned and stored in the patient record.